I Wish I Saw This Earlier as a Creative.
If you don’t decide, someone or something will decide for you.
I want to help you catch the cause of creative depression, demotivation and an increasing likelihood to give up and walk away from something.
It almost happened to me, twice. I’m currently going through it but I’m so much better at spotting it and cutting it out before it becomes an issue — I want you to be too.
You’ve started a new job or a new creative pursuit.
Awesome!
It’s going to make you unhappy IF you let it.
You need to define what success will look like — seriously, actually do it, your mental health will thank you.
I am speaking directly to any creative out there.
Once the novelty wares off, you get catapulted into this uncharted territory, where the question hanging over your head the whole time is ‘How committed are you?’
You answer this question with consistency and acknowledgement of the crap times, but as long as you keep showing up, that question will get quieter and quieter.
What about when it works?
Some people struggle to keep going with a new pursuit because it doesn’t produce any immediate results.
But, what about when it does?
What are you going to do then, huh?
I want you to zoom in on one aspect in particular though, how to prevent your head from exploding from metrics making you their bitch.
Metrics like followers, money made, view counts — metrics like that.
Metrics don’t own you, you own them
Your value becomes linked to these numbers pretty damn quickly if you’re not careful.
Checking YouTube Studio every day, your Medium Partner Program earnings etc — this is where your perceived success is now, you’re linked so heavily, that the highs are wonderful but the lows can be the difference between giving up and hanging on.
Unless you’re that type of person who can switch different modes off and on pretty readily, blindly browsing undefined (are they moving you towards your goals) metrics constantly is a one-way train to having your emotions dictated by numbers on the screen.
I say this from experience — when I started as a video editor creating social media content every day, my barometer of how good of a job I was doing was how many views the content was getting.
It made me miserable, and in need of constant dopamine to fill the gaps if videos didn’t do as well as planned — I was owned by the metrics.
This is not to say there were no other avenues I could have gotten this feedback from, but my value got linked so quickly to checking short videos’ performance every day every hour. I was on my phone for an ungodly amount of time and it scared me.
On weekends I would log in to social media for clients to check — I got sick of it.
Take control, I’m serious.
I had to delete social media apps to make it difficult for me to do it and it worked, I felt so much better. It was a blindingly obvious sign that I hadn’t decided what metrics defined success for me, so it was done for me.
However, when you start a new pursuit, you need some way of telling how well it’s going.
It’s way too easy to get drawn in by the allure of metrics, rather than just consistently showing up.
It’s why I would be a huge fan of being able to hide follower metrics for example, and just be able to show up, not see anything and then repeat.
I went through the cycle.
I started writing about 3 months ago on Medium and it happened again.
‘How many views did that story get?’
‘Who clapped for what?’
‘How much am I being paid?’
I wrote about how dangerous vanity metrics are and how you need to define what success is to you, I didn’t do that, hence we’re back at square one again.
Learning from my first instance however makes it easier to spot the patterns that were starting to emerge, thus easier to cut out.
How to apply it to your life.
- Creating good s*it on the internet is awesome. Keep it that way by defining what you want — what to ignore, what to look at — otherwise it will be chosen for you, and make you unhappy.
- If you don’t know where to start, just keep the warning in mind and experiment. Metrics are insanely valuable to you if you make them that way. Learn, figure out what goals you want and what metrics help push you there, and make sure you use them and not them using you.
- If you’re checking constantly, you have a problem, ask yourself and figure out if you’re ok with that. Is your affinity to metrics a healthy one right now?
- Go out there and make some awesome stuff.
